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building MP3 playlists

From Ben Okopnik

Answered By: Thomas Adam, Heather Stern

I have a directory where I keep my MP3s, arranged my artist and album,
plus a few single songs in the top directory itself. What I wanted was
to build playlists for each album (where the name of the playlist would
be the same as that of the album), including one for all the singles;
not a hard task, considering that a playlist is nothing more than a list
of absolute paths to the mp3s to be played - which is exactly what the
"find" command produces when invoked that way.

[n6tadam@laptop n6tadam]$ apt-cache show mpg321
Description: A Free command-line mp3 player, compatible with mpg123
mpg321 is a clone of the popular mpg123 command-line mp3 player. It should
function as a drop-in replacement for mpg123 in many cases. While some of
the functionality of mpg123 is not yet implemented, mpg321 should function
properly in most cases for most people, such as for frontends such as
gqmpeg.

Ah. I thought it might have been a mispeeling.

Also, this invocation of "find" would get only the top-level MP3s -
none of the ones in the album subdirectories.

[Thomas]
Yes, but then I assume that most of don't have such a highly-ordered set
of files.

How do you figure "most of" organize their MP3s, then? I can't quite see
naming each file something like

etc. Besides, most ripper programs produce a directory structure in the
first place.

[Thomas]
Do they? I admit I have no idea of that -- I prefer CD's.

[Nod] All the spaces are a bit annoying, which is why you don't
generally want to be typing all that stuff out. Fortunately, we have -
tadaa! - playlists.

[Thomas]
I would be
rather annoyed at all the spaces in the filename though. Then again my
file organisation is a mess. You should see my desk.

I can't carry all my CDs with me.
I'd be willing to bet that 256kB
MP3s don't sound any different from CDs even to your musically-trained
ears, even with really good quality headphones.

[Heather]
Maybe Ogg Vorbis format is worth a listen, for people with picky ears.

They sound ever so slightly different to me. **sigh** I miss analog
equalizers. They really hit the sweet spot.

Are these 256kBs, or the standard "anything goes" types? I've never
administered one myself, but AIUI, it's rare for anyone to pass the
actual taste test.

[Heather]
abcde and our household became good friends awhile back - around the
time the CD carousel was getting rowdy about giving us our discs back.

I haven't tried it, but it looks pretty good. These days, I mostly stick
with John the Ripper - nice and simple.

[Thomas]
That being the case then, just change "-maxdepth 1" to "maxdepth 2"

I dunno, these brainiac types with their good ideas....

Which would give you a single playlist with all the songs in it instead
of individual ones, missing the whole point of the exercise.

[Thomas]
Nah, it would still play the songs

So would "find /my/dir|mpg123 -@ -", but that wasn't the point. If I
want to listen to just the ACDC "Back in Black" album, your example
won't be of much use unless you rewrite it every time - including all
those annoying spaces in the album name.

[Heather]
Isn't that what tab completion is for...

Not for those of us who would find retyping the entire command line
every single time a pointless exercise - or like looking at the
playlists to figure out what kind of music feels right next.

[Heather] And the final tidbit, it's always nice to make symlink farms of stuff
you feel fits a nice mood. After you do that, you're not limited to
"albums" in the order your plastic carries them.